Sharing the joys of family life and homeschooling in Japan

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Tag Archives: ホームスクーリング

Every summer, elementary school kids in Japan are expected to do some independent study during their summer vacation and then present their findings to the class when they return to school in the fall. Some kids do science experiments and others learn more about a topic they are interested in, but the kids are free to decide what to learn about. This year Austin wanted to learn more about hermit crabs and he thought it would be fun to do it lapbook style. As far as I can tell, very few people in Japan know about lapbooking, so my guess is that there are not many Japanese lapbooks out there in the world and this may be the only one ever made in Japanese about hermit crabs.

To find out information about these intriguing animals, Austin used a favorite Japanese book we have that gives instructions on how to keep various kinds of pets. I also helped him find Japanese and English websites about hermit crabs — called “yado kari” in Japanese. “Yado kari” literally means house borrowing, which fits hermit crabs since they go around borrowing shells to use as a house. Since we couldn’t find any pre-made materials for making a hermit crab lapbook in Japanese, we used used an English one we found to give us ideas and then used some free type-it-in lapbooking templates from homeschoolshare.com to make our own materials.

Austin made a mini book about what hermit crabs eat and another with interesting facts about them. He also made a life cycle wheel, cards with photos of different types of hermit crabs, a diagram labeling their body parts, and a flip book showing thier predators and prey. He also drew a picture of what a hermit crab’s habitat should look like and made a hermit crab out of origami paper.

Here are links to the websites we used as resources for this project. Many of them are in English, so they can be used by non-Japanese speaking hermit crab fans as well. 🙂